As I write, it is Remembrance weekend; a difficult one for many of us. For anyone who has lost family and friends to war, whether soldiers or civilians, it is important to have space to remember those people as well as the circumstances of their loss. Unfortunately, the pomp and circumstance surrounding our annual remembrance ceremonies based around the ‘victory’ of the First World War can be troubling for peace activists such as myself.
Most years I am involved with alternative…
I’m not finding it at all easy writing about what’s happening in Catalunya (Catalonia) right now. It feels very complex and complicated both at a social and a political level. And it’s also touching me emotionally in a very deep way.
The most worrying aspect is the fragmentation in the social fabric, this is a very exhausting and traumatic time for very many of us. Insults, threats, accusations in every direction. Catalan families divided over independence and families all over…
'People ask me how we would defend the bookfair from a fascist attack, but I’m not worried about them out there. I worry about what we might do to each other in here.’ – one of the organisers of the London Anarchist Bookfair, on 28 October.
A few hours later, a group of trans rights activists stopped some feminists handing out leaflets that they found oppressive to trans women. A nontrans woman, Helen Steel, objected to this censorship. About 30 trans rights activists then surrounded…
Helen John, midwife turned feminist peace campaigner, was best known as a founder of the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, but her extraordinary life of commitment and peace activism went much further.
After joining a 10-day protest walk from Wales to US air force base Greenham Common in August 1981, Helen chained herself to the fence on 5 September, demanding a public debate about NATO’s deployment of cruise missiles. When that was ignored, she led the way in setting up the…
When I was 15 or 16 I saw a film which has remained a favourite with me – and millions of others I suspect. An American in Paris (1951) starred Gene Kelly, the debuting Leslie Caron, and Hollywood’s fantasy version of Paris. A couple of years ago, I wrote a poem, ‘Confessions of a teenage narcissus’, and it contains these lines:
I wanted to look like Gene Kelly
I wanted to be
that American in Paree (Paris)
I wanted Gene Kelly’…
I’ve moved on average every three years across the country and the globe (unfortunately not as a result of my jet-setting lifestyle but because of parental separation and subsequent divorce, family feuds, university, a study abroad year and so on). It would be fair to say that there were many times when the situation was precarious. Times when it was physically, mentally and emotionally paralysing. But also times of immense growth.
The last move was to Leeds into a Radical Routes…
Main goal: Prevent wage cuts
Secondary goal: Stop strikebreakers from working
Successes:
In achieving specific demands: 3 out of 6 points
Survival: 1 out of 1
Growth: 3 out of 3
Overall success: 7 out of 10
The campaign achieved its secondary goal of ending the use of strikebreakers. It also prevented further governmental and military intervention into labour conflicts in Sweden. However it is not clear if the strike prevented wage cuts. For…
Diversity is Beautiful (right) is just one of the rich posters and prints to come out of the new Cato Press in Easton, Bristol. The community-run studio puts on courses for all in printmaking. It makes huge, collectively-cut prints and places itself firmly in the political printmaking tradition of José Guadalupe Posada and the Mexican Taller de Gráfica Popular (and also the…
Goals:
A 21.5 percent wage increase to match the inflation rate An end to the austerity measures, including layoffs and spending cuts A stop to the privatisation of state-owned companies, including telephone, gas, oil, and electricity.The union leaders achieved their main demand to increase wages. They were partially successful in pressuring the government to agree to delay and review their austerity measures and plans to privatise state companies, though they did not receive…
While arms companies have been at the top of the peace agenda recently with the DSEI arms fair, their involvement in education in the UK is less well known. Many of the top names have a presence – BAE Systems, Rolls Royce, Babcock, QinetiQ, Chemring. Some are big players, forging the way ahead, others have a smaller role.
A ForcesWatch report on military interests in education (out soon) will detail the extent to which this has developed and why. It looks at how the armed forces,…
US radical Noam Chomsky recently warned against ‘self-destructive’ anti-fascist tactics such as disrupting right-wing meetings, something that is ‘wrong in principle’, he told the Washington Examiner.
Chomsky added: ‘When confrontation shifts to the arena of violence, it’s the toughest and most brutal who win – and we know who that is. That’s quite apart from the opportunity…
Like many who work from home, I have the radio on for most of the day. So Radio 4 or 5 is a chattering background while I pretend to get on with it. Now and again I deliberately listen to something but mostly it just keeps me company – as do my cats. Thus it was recently that my attention was suddenly caught by a woman saying on air that she was one of many who regarded Cornwall ‘as a country not a county’.
My ears pricked up at this for I’d recently been to Cornwall for the Charles…
On 23 September, 18 of us went on a bus tour across East Sussex to collect signatures for a petition asking the county council to divest local people’s pensions from fossil fuels. I was a little hazy on the details at first, but by the end I had heard the explanation of what the petition was about so many times that I’m probably still saying it in my sleep.
Equipped with T-shirts (just enough of us were…
It is nearly 70 years since I began my two years of conscripted military service.
Having been to a boarding school, it was not much of a shock. Despite some class differences we were all in the same boat and got shouted at in the same way by various corporals and sergeants.
In 1947, the cold war was just starting, and it was to faraway places like Malaysia and Korea that some of my contemporaries were sent. At least one, my friend ‘Tubby’ Maycock, a year below me at…
’Biktub Ismak Ya Biladi, ‘al shams ilma bit(a)gheeb
La mali wala wlaadi, ‘Ala Hubik mafe Habib.
I will write your name oh my country, above the sun that never sets.
Not my children nor my wealth, above your love there is no love.
I first heard this song at a demonstration in Nabi Saleh in the West Bank, Palestine, in 2012. I was in the village to participate in a demonstration with my choir and, as is their tradition of…
Ghost scene, woodcut, 1932, by Taninaka Yasunori.
Taninaka Yasunori was born in 1897, in Sakurai, Nara Prefecture, Japan, spent his childhood in Seoul, Korea, and died in September 1946. He was a Japanese woodcut artist with often surrealistic content, a poet and a magazine editor. In 1930, Taninaka began publishing the magazine Black and White. He participated in exhibitions of the Japanese…
Goal: To stop open-cast coal mining.
Phulbari is an important agricultural region in northwest Bangladesh that also contains a low-quality coal deposit. Several companies have proposed using open-cast (or open-pit) mining techniques in Phulbari, which would displace thousands of people (many of them indigenous people), destroy farmland and homes, and divert water sources to the mining process.
Australia-based mining company BHP Billiton, which discovered coal in…
The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power, a group against AIDS, protests in New York City against the Anti-Homosexuality Bill in Uganda. PHOTO: riekhavoc via Wikimedia Commons
Someone rang up the other day and asked what PN thought about ‘peace education’. I said that there was a range of things going on, from super-fluffy let’s-just-be-nice-to-each-other talk which does more harm than good, through activist history and analysis, to training that helps people to gain skills and to…
What an odd world of priorities we live in. Any more about Brexit – important though it is in so many ways – tends now to produce a yawn.
Yet the recent Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has not even started to be a priority. We must all make it one.
It was passed with the support of 122 countries at a UN conference a couple of weeks ago. Only the Netherlands voted ‘No’.
The nuclear weapon countries, including our own, took no part. In fact Michael…
When my choir San Ghanny (‘We Shall Sing’ in Arabic) and I were in Palestine two months ago, we took part in a demonstration to call for the return of Palestinian bodies from the Israeli government.
The campaign is led by family members, often mothers, of Palestinians who have been killed by Israeli forces, or who have been involved in militarised resistance to the occupation resulting in their own deaths. This includes desperate actions such as suicide bombing.
For family…
